---
title: "Introduction"
description: "Keep is an open-source alert management and AIOps platform that is a swiss-knife for alerting, automation, and noise reduction."
---

<Note>
  {" "}
  You can start exploring Keep by simply logging in to the [platform](https://platform.keephq.dev).
  Make sure to also join our [Slack community](https://slack.keephq.dev) to get help
  and share your feedback.
</Note>

## What's an alert?

An alert is an event that is triggered when something undesirable occurs or is about to occur.
It is usually triggered by monitoring tools. Example could include: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or CloudWatch, and your own proprietary tools.

Alerts are usually categorized into three different groups:

- Infrastructure-related alerts - e.g., a virtual machine consumes more than 99% CPU.
- Application-related alerts - e.g., an endpoint starts returning 5XX status codes.
- Business-related alerts - e.g., a drop in the number of sign-ins or purchases.

## What problem does Keep solve?

Keep helps with every step of the alert lifecycle:

1. Maintenance - Keep integrates with all of your monitoring tools, allowing you to manage all of your alerts within a single pane of glass.
2. Noise reduction - By integrating with monitoring tools, Keep can deduplicate and correlate alerts to reduce noise in your organization. There are 2 types of deduplication: Rule-based (semi-manual) and AI-based (fully automated).
3. Automation - [Keep Workflows](/workflows) is a GitHub Actions-like experience for automating anything that is triggered by things in Keep: alerts, events, incidents, manually and based on time intervals. It can help with: alert enrichment, ticket creation, self-healing, root cause analysis, and more.
4. Incident Correlation - Correlate alerts to incidents, performs triage, and conducts root cause analysis.

## How does Keep get my alerts?

There are primarily two ways to get alerts into Keep:

### Push

When you connect a [Provider](/providers), Keep automatically instruments the tools to send alerts to Keep via webhook.
As an example, when you connect Grafana, Keep will automatically create a new Webhook contact point in Grafana, and a new Notification Policy to send all alerts to Keep.

You can configure which providers you want to push from by checking the `Install Webhook` checkbox in the provider settings.

<Frame>
  <img src="/images/pushing-enabled.png" />
</Frame>

### Pull

When you connect a [Provider](/providers), Keep will start pulling alerts from the tool automatically.
Pulling interval is defined by the `KEEP_PULL_INTERVAL` environment variable and defaults to 7 days and can be completely turned off by using the `KEEP_PULL_DATA_ENABLED` environment variable.

You can also configure which providers you want to pull from by checking the `Pulling Enabled` checkbox in the provider settings.

<Frame>
  <img src="/images/pulling-enabled.png" />
</Frame>

<Tip>
  We strongly recommend using the push method for alerting, as pulling does not
  include a lot of the features, like workflow automation. It is mainly used for
  a quick way to get alerts into Keep and start exploring the value.
</Tip>
